Posted
by
Soulskill
on Thursday June 24, 2010 @05:32AM
from the slices-dices-etc dept.

Vigile writes "Microsoft unveiled a new Xbox 360 S console at E3 this month, and without delay the new machine has been dissected and tested. The most dramatic change is the move to a single-chip CPU/GPU hybrid processor that is apparently being built on the 45nm process technology from GlobalFoundries, AMD's spun-off production facilities. With the inclusion of the new processor, the Xbox 360 S uses much less power (about 30-40%) compared to previous generation machines, and also turns out to be much quieter as a result of a single, larger fan. This article has photographic evidence of the teardown, with comparisons between this Valhalla platform and the older Falcon system, along with videos of the reconstruction process and noise comparisons."
The new console also takes measures to protect itself from overheating, so RRoDs shouldn't be a problem with this revision.

I really wonder about this, The sole reason everyone was moving their 360 was because of the gravity orientation on the 'Ring of light' anyway, has anyone ever tried rotating a ps1/ps2/saturn/dreamcast/gamecube/xbox in the same way?

i'd say the disc scratching is a non-issue, sure some pads would be nice, but any carefull gamer wouldnt move a running console around anyway..

Should MS really cover every violation of common sense? I don't really consider this to be a defect - the XBox360 was not designed as a portable platform, and as such there is a reasonable expectation that the unit should never be moved when in operation.

Less cooling my arse. It has a much larger heat-sink and a proper 120mm fan bolted right on top of it. It's got comparable cooling to my enthusiast desktop. Not to mention the simple, inescapable thermodynamic certainty that a machine that is consuming less electrical power will produce less heat.

While I have no idea whether the overheating issues are actually true or not, every single site that talks about it have the exact same screenshot and video, and despite the artifacting in the video the overheating warning never seems to come up. So either the overheating protection doesn't work at all, or something else is causing the artifacting.

"b) It's a bad idea to move anything that has a spinning disc in it, from harddisks, to dvd-players, whatever."

Portable cd music player and classic iPods have spinning discs and don't suffer from this problem. It is reasonable that a consumer product should be able to get through light abuse, it's 2010, not 1980 and cd technology has evolved, not Microsoft.

I doubt it. The Xbox360 Slim was on sale just days later. It would be pretty retard to use a prototype instead of finished hardware for presentation when the final hardware is ready.

b) It's a bad idea to move anything that has a spinning disc in it, from harddisks, to dvd-players, whatever.

Yeah, so what. Fact remains the Xbox360 is the only console in history that is famous for destroying discs. It was never an issue with any other console, not even with the Xbox1. And Microsoft has known this for the last five years, yet refuses to do anything about it (no, warning sticker doesn't count).

c) Why would you need to move your console while it's running anyway?

It is not about need, it is about stuff that happens in real life use. Cats might bump into it, people might trip over cables or maybe you just bump the console a little while you try to insert a USB connector. Just see the destructoid video, guy wants to get a closer look, lifts it up, Alan Wake goes bye-bye. He shouldn't have done it, but neither should the Xbox360 destroyed the disc.

Since when is moving a unit while a disc is spinning a good idea? I've always assumed such a thing isn't a good plan. At the speeds those discs spin, there is going to be a non-trivial amount of gyroscopic force. Given that with normal DVD drives like you find in desktop computers and DVD players and the 360 the disc just floats on the spindle, movement wouldn't be good.

Now something like a laptop drive is more designed for that sort of thing, it grips the disc directly and has less room for it to move around. Of course there's tradeoffs including a higher cost, and lower speeds. However even then I try to keep the thing sitting still when it is reading something.

Just because something can't resist any and everything doesn't mean it has a "defect". There are real physical issues you have to contend with. My car won't survive a 40mph impact with a wall, it will crumple to the point it is destroyed. However, it isn't defective (in fact it is designed to fail so that the bodies inside it do not).

A lot of platforms that aren't ostensibly portable get used as such. Case in point: a game console run off an inverter in a minivan or RV for 3-hour road trips. These subject a machine to whatever road vibration the suspension doesn't absorb.

Do you have to be a masochist to own a 360 or something? I mean I usually hate all the fanboy one-upping and such, but in all seriousness, why would you even put up with that kind of shit?

The only reason I started buying consoles was to get away from Microsoft software (Windows gaming is great, as long as you can put up with Windows). To then subject yourself to both MS hardware and software seems like lunacy to me.

It could also be a social thing. If your friends are getting Xbox'en then even if the titles are available on the PS3, they are typically hosted on separate servers, so you need to be using the same console.

That's the Only reason I bought a 360. I had a PS3 already, but I wanted to get some gaming done with my local friends. All the folks with whom I played PC games had moved 2 time zones away and it was hard to schedule gaming time. All the local people had 360s and were playing Halo 3 and Gears of War. Before that I never would have considered playing an FPS on a console.

It turns out I have a lot of fun with the 360 and play on it by myself as much as I do on the PS3. I've learned not to be a snob when it comes to consoles because the only person losing out would be me.

I'm 2 years running into my 20 gig Xbox 360 unit. I really wish Microsoft would reduce the hard drive add-on prices to more realistic levels. The casing around the HD can't cost THAT much. It would almost be better to just buy the new slim unit(that has over 10 times the hard drive space I have) than to buy the 250 gig drive alone.

I could buy a 1 terabyte drive for my system for less than they charge for a 120 gig unit.

Disclaimer: I own gaming consoles from many different companies (Atari, Sega, Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, etc), and although I use Windows 7 on my gaming rig, I have Ubuntu running on everything else.

but after Vista and the 360 RRoD problems, they've gone back to being a joke in my eyes

That's a shame. Windows 7 and everything from the Falcon revision or later for the 360 have been solid, well-made products. For me, the 360 was worth it for a few reasons:

1. Exclusives. There are some Xbox Live Arcade exclusives ('Splosion Man, Trials HD, and Shadow Complex alone are almost worth the price of the console) and some retail exclusives (Fable II and soon III, the Crackdown series, Chromehounds, Dead Rising, etc.)

2. The controller. I know that the dual shock is considered to be the "pinnacle" of controller design...but fuck that. I've always found it to be a bit awkward to hold, and slightly too small. The 360 controller is, aside from the horrendous d-pad, just about perfect. YMMV, of course.

3. This no longer applies, but keep in mind that the 360 was the first 7th gen console that was released, and ushered in a new era in complexity for consoles (admittedly, complexity that we PC gamers had enjoyed for nearly a decade, but still...it was exciting.) My time spent with friends when the 360 first launched are some great memories, so even though the console is only five years old, I already have nostalgia associated with it.

A friend of mine is on his twentieth xbox. All RROD. Of course, he plays it a hell of a lot more than I do, but still... that's getting ridiculous.

...maybe it's something he's doing? "This piece of shit console. Every time one dies, I get a new one, open the glass door on my stereo cabinet, put it on top of my amp, you know, right over the ventiliation slits, close the glass door, and start playing. And every time, the goddamn thing overheats and dies eventually!"